


rain on the roof in the middle of the night

by luxuryproblems



Category: The Skeleton Twins (2014)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gen, Loneliness, im sad but not drunk, milo is drunk and sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-04 11:50:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18343109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luxuryproblems/pseuds/luxuryproblems
Summary: Lance pushes Milo's head down to get him in the car, while Milo continues to laugh at his own joke. When Lance shuts the door, it's almost immediate that Milo starts crying.





	rain on the roof in the middle of the night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stefonzolesky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stefonzolesky/gifts).



> title from rainy days in la by adam&steve ft. waterparks

Loneliness is not something Milo is a stranger to. Whether it was the times spent as a kid alone is his bedroom on Friday nights and weekends listening to Starship and waiting for Maggie to come home or spending a Friday night as an adult in a crowded gay bar with an empty seat next to him and no one to talk to, it’s an aura that coats him like a cold blanket and doesn’t let up. He’s sick of it, but he’s starting to understand that being lonely mixes best with being entirely fucking wasted. 

A glass of wine at dinner with Maggie and Lance, a shot of whiskey while talking to her before bed, and half a bottle of scotch at the corner liquor store when the loneliness sets in at around midnight. 

God, he wishes there was someone he could talk to. Maybe if he were younger and prettier he could go up to any boy and whisper something to them and end up in their bed for the night. A night in bed with a stranger was far less lonely than laying in bed by himself and maybe jerking off to distract himself. God, he wishes he were with Rich right now. There's nothing in the world he wants more than to be treated like he kind of matters, even if it's only for an hour. A quick fuck, maybe a compliment or two, and then kicked out before his wife or kid find them.

Somehow, that would be enough.

Milo knows he should probably go home and go to sleep because either Maggie or Lance are up and are worried sick about where he is or what he's doing or if he's fallen back into old habits or if he's still alive. He just stays put.

He's sitting on the curb outside of the liquor store, illuminated by the dim lights through the windows as he clutches the now half empty bottle of scotch in a brown paper bag. He wants to cry. He wants to cry so badly. But, he can't. He just continues to drink and drink and drink until he becomes numb to the loneliness that has cast him into a shadow. He's already numbing due to the frigid temperatures in the air and the cold concrete ground on his legs and ass, and it's able to distract him. 

There's a car horn a few feet away from him, and Milo looks up. Maybe it's someone he went to high school with who sees him, drunk and sad on a curb, and sees how absolutely pathetic he is. Maybe it's some guy who is willing to distract him from the loneliness for a few hours and let him sleep in his house. Or maybe it's the police and he's gonna get arrested for public intoxication. At least he'd be doing something.

Instead, it's Lance. 

He's probably come out to get a drink to distract himself from the loneliness of his failing marriage with Maggie. She's admitted to taking birth control and not being ready to have a child, and if it were just that, he could probably cope with it. But, when she admitted to sleeping with other men, he couldn't take it. 

It was almost like he completely shut down. He smokes now and drinks more frequently and he doesn't want to go hiking or really do anything anymore. They don't sleep in the same bed anymore, and Milo has offered up his guest bedroom bed for Lance and has taken up the couch. Seeing Lance like this, it's strange. It's like seeing a whole new person, a new person who he's never met before and doesn't know if he will ever truly understand. 

Lance's face seems to fall but also soften when he sees Milo. It's like he's stunned or ashamed to see him here, yet he's relieved to see him at all. He goes over to Milo, who has retreated his head into his sweater as an attempt to hide from him, and puts his hands under his armpits and on his sides and hoists him off of the curb. Milo stands up with little fight in him to stay seated and just falls into Lance's chest, like he's got nothing to support himself except for Lance. 

“Come on, buddy,” Lance murmurs as he takes Milo back to his car, “let's get you home before you freeze to death.”

Milo lets a small laugh out of his mouth, a laugh that's somewhat condescending, and snarkily replies, “Just leave me there to find a pimp.”

Lance pushes Milo's head down to get him in the car, while Milo continues to laugh at his own joke. When Lance shuts the door, it's almost immediate that Milo starts crying.

He feels terrible for putting Maggie and Lance through the bullshit he's put them through. For the first time in a long time, Milo finally allows himself to break down. He grieves for a past long forgotten and he grieves for the future that he's not sure if he'll ever see and he grieves for Maggie and Lance having to put up with him and he grieves mostly for himself and how he's unable to be happy and how he's sitting here in the car of someone who he loves and who he's pretty sure at least respects him and he still wants to slit his wrists again. 

Lance puts his hand on Milo's shoulder as a loving gesture and it scares Milo so much that he jumps in his seat. He seems to cower back at the action of affection, an action he so desperately craves. He wants to reciprocate the affection so badly but he's so not use to it that it's almost like Lance could of slapped him in the face and he would've felt the same. 

“Let's get you home, we'll talk there,” Lance tells him. 

He doesn't ask him if he wants or needs to talk, he tells him they're going to talk. Milo needs this, and he's so insecure in his feelings and what he's done in the past that if Lance had asked him if he needed to talk rather than telling them they're going to talk, he would've definitely rejected it. 

Milo can only drunkenly nod. 

He stares out the window at the naked trees as they drive until they become more and more familiar when they pull up to the house. Lance gets out of the car first and goes over to Milo's door to open it and help him if he needs it. Milo stumbles out of the car, but with a few seconds of regaining his balance and Lance's arm around his waist that he barely notices, he is able to hold himself up. 

The porch still has chips in the bricks from years of use. There's a knocked over watering can by a bushel of dead plants and Milo can only chuckle at the irony while his eyes puff up from crying. 

“Let's go, dude,” Lance tells him, almost pleading with him, and they climb the stairs like their legs are tied together, same steps, same time, same leg. 

Milo falls forward onto the first vaguely couch shaped piece of furniture he sees, which (thankfully) actually ends up being the couch. Lance leaves him for a moment to make him a cup of coffee to sober him up, to maybe get a coherent thought out of him. 

Lance really cares about Milo. He's not really sure how to show it but he loves him, he truly does. He had never met Milo until his suicide attempt and has only really ever known Milo at his lowest, but he knows that Milo has something special in him. He knows that if they met at a different time in Milo's life, a time where Milo didn't have scars on his arms and was learning to heal the scars in his heart, they would be a lot more than just barely roommates. 

He picks a note off the coffee machine that's in Maggie's handwriting. 

_“went to a friend's. be back in morning. im sorry. -m”_

Lance sighs and crumbles up the note only to throw the balled up piece of paper back onto the counter. He sets up the coffee, presses the power button on the machine, and then goes back into the living room. Milo is sitting up now, eyes wide with drunken confusion and fear, and he's clutching a throw pillow to his chest. 

He stands over the couch and looks down at Milo. “So,” he starts, and Milo looks behind him to look directly at him, “where’d you go?”

Milo looks back forward and presses his face lightly into the pillow, slightly embarrassed. “To get drunk,” he mumbles back. 

Lance walks to the front of the couch to sit himself next to Milo, a considerable distance but close enough to provide comfort. He isn’t sure what Milo’s comfortable with at this point. He knows he’s lonely, he knows they’re both so fucking lonely but they’re both lonely to the point where they don’t exactly understand how to rid the loneliness. Milo’s been hiding himself and his feelings for years and Lance has been having someone hide themselves and their feelings for years from him. 

They’re not so different, despite their differences. 

Minutes pass and Milo and Lance are still sitting on the couch, at their comfortable enough distance apart but close enough to be comforting if either of them were to need it positions, except both of them are nursing their own cups of coffee. Milo has calmed down a little bit and Lance has spent the past five minutes trying to read Milo, to find out if he’s thinking anything too unnerving that would warrant them a trip to the hospital.

Lance isn’t the sharpest bulb in the box, but he knows people. 

“I’m just,” Milo starts and Lance snaps out of his daydream of staring at Milo and trying to figure him out to just completely and utterly listen to him, “I’m just being stupid. I’m back home and I’m sad and I’m just lashing out by doing dumb shit to get a rise out of someone.” 

Lance takes a short sip of his coffee to mask the question he’s wanted to ask since the beginning of the night. “Are you lonely, Milo?” He asks, even though he already knows the answer.

Milo nearly laughs, almost like he knows that Lance already knows the answer, then Milo just shakes his head a little. “How can I not be?” He asks, sarcastically. They both don’t say anything for a minute, and Milo looks down into his coffee, like he’s trying to see something. He takes a sip, swirls the dark liquid in the cup for a second, and then takes another sip. “I’m sorry,” Milo tells Lance completely out of instinct.

Lance doesn’t respond. He just takes another sip of his coffee. They let a few minutes pass in comfortably awkward silence, until Lance puts his coffee down on the end table. He needs to start _something_. He needs to get Milo to open up about something, anything, just talk and get out whatever he needs to get out.

“What are you thinkin’ about?”

Milo looks up in response, and just gives a half smirk and a chuckle. “Thinkin’ bout how I basically ruined your marriage. If I never came around you and my sister would still be the picture perfect couple who, I don’t know, have sex every night and go hunting on the weekend.”

“You know I was bound to find out, right?” Lance asks Milo, completely serious. Sure, it would take a long time for him to think about going in that decorative soap dish, but he knows if he was looking for something at some point, he would eventually reach into it and find it. It might’ve taken months, even years, but it was inevitable. 

Milo just shrugs, but nods anyway. He wrecks his brain searching for a way to string together how he’s feelings, to put Lance at ease, to put himself at ease, to confirm to both of them that he doesn’t actually wanna kill himself right now. He wanted to in the beginning of the night, that’s for damn sure, but he’s okay right now. 

All he can end up blurting out is, “I just wish I had someone to help me forget the loneliness.”

Lance gets it.

“I wish I had someone waiting for me when I got home. Hell, even if I was waiting for someone when they got home. I’ve never had that. Even if it’s gone now, both you and my sister have had that at times in your lives. You guys have built a life together, and I haven’t been able to do that. I wish I was enough for someone to be more than just a quick fuck, even if that’s what I would considerably settle for on most nights. I wish,” Milo stops for a moment and realizes he’s crying, he’s fucking crying again, over a stupid situation that he’s kind of put himself in for being stupid and emotional and detaching himself from everyone. He wipes his face and quickly finishes, “I wish I had someone to hold me through the dark times.” 

Milo feels like he’s holding his breath while Lance processes what he’s said. Milo feels like he’s gonna throw up but Lance feels like the one who’s been punched in the stomach. He just can’t believe that Milo hasn’t opened up about this to him, to anyone really, before. He wants to sit here and coax more stuff out of him, to get a better sense of what it’s like to live in Milo Dean’s head and try to get him to talk about the past and maybe, just maybe, he’ll be able to help him. 

“God,” Milo laughs a little, “I’m treating you like you’re my fuckin’ shrink.” 

Lance does the one think Milo mentioned that he could definitely do.

Lance reaches over, completely breaks over the comfortable/comforting line that they’ve built and leans it more into the comforting side than the comfortable. He wraps two arms around Milo and Milo, instinctively, tenses, and then he relaxes after a few seconds of being absolutely, completely stiff. Two gentle hands come up around Lance’s left arm, which is tenderly draped over Milo’s torso, and they grip gently. 

Milo turns himself over, buries his face into Lance’s chest, and allows himself to be distracted from the loneliness.


End file.
